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Trans Studies
Winner of the 2024 Gold Line Press Nonfiction Chapbook Contest
Trans Studies is a body of observations, reflections, and vignettes in search of a story that might could be a person. Odelle eyeballs pop culture, gender discourse, and her bad habit of giving boys chances with sharp wit and wicked humor. A memoir in drag, Trans Studies reaches for community and the threads of theory she needs to spin a cute dress and survive. “Is anything like a life on the other side?” Odelle asks and writes shamelessly into the trans femme desire to find out.
“What is the relationship between trans studies and trans life? Between our endless (generative, inane) theorizing about Gender (and our genders) and the erotic, spiritual, psychic work of becoming, of taking up an other form? ‘Is anything like a life on the other side?’ Certainly, these questions cannot be answered with any finality, but Crystal Odelle has given them a thorough, playful, and deadly serious working over. Irreverent and sharp, searching and tender, riotous and resigned, Odelle’s Trans Studies emerges adjacent to (literally, in the office of) Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and moves brilliantly, ambivalently through the maddening discourses that saturate trans feminine experience toward something like a life.”
—Cameron Awkward-Rich, author of Dispatch and The Terrible We
“Intimate, cutting with both pleasure and ache. Odelle’s writing in Trans Studies reveals the tautologies of gender, the ephemerality of identity, the bright joys and jagged glass edges of trans femme lesbian life. Reading her poetry feels like being in community.”
—micha cárdenas, artist and author of Atoms Never Touch and Poetic Operations
“With Trans Studies, Crystal Odelle has created a deeply intimate, razor sharp, and often laugh-out-loud tapestry of gender and sexuality. Odelle takes us from the community of a trans femme meetup group, to intrusive thoughts that enter her mind on dates, to Audre Lorde, The Matrix, and beyond, inviting readers to witness all the contours of her nuanced story, as well as to interrogate their own. I couldn’t get enough of her voice, which traverses from playful, tender, and biting with elegance and wit. Trans Studies leans into the complicated messiness of being human. Odelle is a writer to watch.”
—Edgar Gomez, author of High-Risk Homosexual
Trans Studies is a body of observations, reflections, and vignettes in search of a story that might could be a person. Odelle eyeballs pop culture, gender discourse, and her bad habit of giving boys chances with sharp wit and wicked humor. A memoir in drag, Trans Studies reaches for community and the threads of theory she needs to spin a cute dress and survive. “Is anything like a life on the other side?” Odelle asks and writes shamelessly into the trans femme desire to find out.
“What is the relationship between trans studies and trans life? Between our endless (generative, inane) theorizing about Gender (and our genders) and the erotic, spiritual, psychic work of becoming, of taking up an other form? ‘Is anything like a life on the other side?’ Certainly, these questions cannot be answered with any finality, but Crystal Odelle has given them a thorough, playful, and deadly serious working over. Irreverent and sharp, searching and tender, riotous and resigned, Odelle’s Trans Studies emerges adjacent to (literally, in the office of) Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and moves brilliantly, ambivalently through the maddening discourses that saturate trans feminine experience toward something like a life.”
—Cameron Awkward-Rich, author of Dispatch and The Terrible We
“Intimate, cutting with both pleasure and ache. Odelle’s writing in Trans Studies reveals the tautologies of gender, the ephemerality of identity, the bright joys and jagged glass edges of trans femme lesbian life. Reading her poetry feels like being in community.”
—micha cárdenas, artist and author of Atoms Never Touch and Poetic Operations
“With Trans Studies, Crystal Odelle has created a deeply intimate, razor sharp, and often laugh-out-loud tapestry of gender and sexuality. Odelle takes us from the community of a trans femme meetup group, to intrusive thoughts that enter her mind on dates, to Audre Lorde, The Matrix, and beyond, inviting readers to witness all the contours of her nuanced story, as well as to interrogate their own. I couldn’t get enough of her voice, which traverses from playful, tender, and biting with elegance and wit. Trans Studies leans into the complicated messiness of being human. Odelle is a writer to watch.”
—Edgar Gomez, author of High-Risk Homosexual
Paperback
Published January 15, 2025
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About the author
Crystal Odelle
3 books56 followersAuthor of Trans Studies, Crystal Odelle (they / she) is a storyteller of trans / polyamorous / whore practice, writing and revising into the desire for something like a life.
Their stories have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Foglifter, Split Lip Magazine, smoke and mold, Apogee, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. Crystal was a Lambda Literary fellow and Tin House Scholar, nominated for Best of the Net, and anthologized in We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction. Her writing and performances trouble the divide between fiction and reality toward liberation.
She serves as chapbooks editor at Newfound, a hybrid reader for Abode Press, and academic and administrative coordinator for the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at WashU.
Their stories have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Foglifter, Split Lip Magazine, smoke and mold, Apogee, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. Crystal was a Lambda Literary fellow and Tin House Scholar, nominated for Best of the Net, and anthologized in We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction. Her writing and performances trouble the divide between fiction and reality toward liberation.
She serves as chapbooks editor at Newfound, a hybrid reader for Abode Press, and academic and administrative coordinator for the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at WashU.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 8, 2025
Thank you so much to the author for the gifted copy!
Reading Trans Studies by Crystal Odelle feels like cracking yourself open and finding glitter, grief, theory, and teeth. This is not a tidy memoir or a neatly theorized academic text—it’s something messier and far more alive. Odelle crafts an elliptical, poetic reckoning with trans femme embodiment, desire, and survival in a world that insists on misreading them. Her prose is jagged and intimate, a genre-shifting fusion of vignette, critical reflection, and spiritual longing that resists easy categorization, much like transness itself.
Across these pages, Odelle excavates what it means to be illegible—not just to cis institutions like academia, but even within queer and trans community. They name the ache of being seen as a gender-fraud, of chasing an essential womanhood that might not exist, of finding affinity in femininity despite its erasures. There’s humor here (dark, biting, unrepentant), but it’s always threaded with a tender awareness of the cost of visibility and the psychological toll of transmisogyny. One recurring question echoes beneath it all: if the world is bent on your disappearance, how do you stay?
Trans Studies is not interested in making transness palatable—it refuses tidy narratives of becoming. Instead, Odelle writes into the contradictions of nonbinary transfemininity with bold vulnerability and incisive clarity. They let messiness in. She writes of suicidal ideation without flinching, of desire as both power and wound, of longing for a life that feels inhabitable. Their writing holds space for the sacred, the sexual, and the scholarly all at once.
This book is not a roadmap, but it is a companion for anyone searching for language to hold the shifting, often brutal, always beautiful experience of trans femme life. A searing, gorgeous act of survival. I feel lucky to have read it.
📖 Read this if you love: genre-defying memoirs, trans theory rooted in lived experience, and writing that’s as intellectually sharp as it is emotionally raw.
🔑 Key Themes: Transfemininity and Illegibility, the Perception of Gender, Desire and Suicidality, Writing as Survival.
Content / Trigger Warnings: Suicidal Thoughts (minor), Suicide (minor), Misogyny (minor), Drug Use (minor).
Reading Trans Studies by Crystal Odelle feels like cracking yourself open and finding glitter, grief, theory, and teeth. This is not a tidy memoir or a neatly theorized academic text—it’s something messier and far more alive. Odelle crafts an elliptical, poetic reckoning with trans femme embodiment, desire, and survival in a world that insists on misreading them. Her prose is jagged and intimate, a genre-shifting fusion of vignette, critical reflection, and spiritual longing that resists easy categorization, much like transness itself.
Across these pages, Odelle excavates what it means to be illegible—not just to cis institutions like academia, but even within queer and trans community. They name the ache of being seen as a gender-fraud, of chasing an essential womanhood that might not exist, of finding affinity in femininity despite its erasures. There’s humor here (dark, biting, unrepentant), but it’s always threaded with a tender awareness of the cost of visibility and the psychological toll of transmisogyny. One recurring question echoes beneath it all: if the world is bent on your disappearance, how do you stay?
Trans Studies is not interested in making transness palatable—it refuses tidy narratives of becoming. Instead, Odelle writes into the contradictions of nonbinary transfemininity with bold vulnerability and incisive clarity. They let messiness in. She writes of suicidal ideation without flinching, of desire as both power and wound, of longing for a life that feels inhabitable. Their writing holds space for the sacred, the sexual, and the scholarly all at once.
This book is not a roadmap, but it is a companion for anyone searching for language to hold the shifting, often brutal, always beautiful experience of trans femme life. A searing, gorgeous act of survival. I feel lucky to have read it.
📖 Read this if you love: genre-defying memoirs, trans theory rooted in lived experience, and writing that’s as intellectually sharp as it is emotionally raw.
🔑 Key Themes: Transfemininity and Illegibility, the Perception of Gender, Desire and Suicidality, Writing as Survival.
Content / Trigger Warnings: Suicidal Thoughts (minor), Suicide (minor), Misogyny (minor), Drug Use (minor).
August 13, 2025
Is there a commonality to experiences as a trans woman? Beyond the modifications to our bodies and hormones - learning how to become a commodity, to see yourself through the eyes of a thousand other people, to bask in the beautiful self-pity of community. Trans Studies isn't another narrative with a bloated message of self-empowerment, rather a raw and messy introspection on transition, self-love, sex, and how we belong to them. Trans Studies came to me at the perfect time in my life, and I hope it finds more people.
August 7, 2025
I don't know if there was a particular structure I should have picked up on, but I just let it all wash over me, all the anecdotes and poems and loose thoughts, and some of them made me laugh and some of them made me want to cry and for the most part my heart was doing parkour while it navigated every emotion in between.
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November 10, 2025
shout out to local STL authors, and left bank books bc I picked this up on my bday yesterday and I'm glad I did
a little confusing for me, I'm non-binary and do not personally relate to most of the trans femme experience, and my trans experience has been different but I could still relate to a lot of the thoughts expressed here. this is a book I'll come back to and probably end up annotating :-)
a little confusing for me, I'm non-binary and do not personally relate to most of the trans femme experience, and my trans experience has been different but I could still relate to a lot of the thoughts expressed here. this is a book I'll come back to and probably end up annotating :-)
November 10, 2024
It's my party, and I'll cry if I want to. <3
December 30, 2025
A short and powerful book that explores identity, relationships, and queerness. Loved the lyrical writing style!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews